Concert

The show presents itself as a musical and artistic conversation between two queer creators, whose works constantly push the boundaries of sonic exploration. Each inspired in their own way by the power of nature in its most arid, inhospitable, yet fascinating and meditative aspects, the two created works will offer the audience an intense journey between extremes, from the desert to the winter thaw.

About I Lost the Desert by Nour Symon

I Lost the Desert is part of the ongoing inspiration I have drawn for many years from Nicole Brossard's novel "Le Désert Mauve," which I recently adapted into an opera. After wanting to depict through a large-scale musical device (3 voices and a large ensemble) the immensity of the desert and the intensity of Mélanie, the young protagonist of the novel, I return, through this new, more intimate composition, to the feeling of peace and tranquility that the first reading of Brossard's novel inspired in me in 2011.

Thus, following the creation of "Le Désert Mauve," I was confronted with my own desert, during a trip to Egypt, my father's country of origin. What seemed at first glance to be a return to my roots after 30 years of absence turned out to be a completely destabilizing experience, through which I was confronted with the inadequacy of words, their limits, in the face of the otherness that constitutes us. I resonated particularly with the Coptic minority from which my family comes, the survivors of Egypt's first nations, historically persecuted from the Roman occupation to the current military dictatorship, who found in the desert and in the pharaonic temples hidden there a place of resistance. Once again, Nicole Brossard's words accompanied me and gave a particularly acute echo to my experience:

I lost the desert in the night of writing. There is undoubtedly a time when one must know how to stop, to block in front of stupidity, to agree that words are not always up to the task or that they can darken our enthusiasm, thwart our beautiful thinking maneuvers. Now the evidence must rekindle the desert in me and once again the coral snake and the bobcat kiss the ground with their colors.

In the course of composing the piece, I reconnected more and more deeply with a form of sound meditation - tarab - emblematic of Egyptian music, which is one of the major sources of my listening. Tarab is a form of infinite immersion in intensity, where all the emotions that inhabit us are summoned at the same time, where only the unbridled dive into oneself and the human contact between musicians and spectators counts. 

And where the intensity of my Egyptian experience inhabited the taking of video images at the basis of the graphic score of this piece, it is rather the shock of the Palestinian genocide reported daily by journalists such as بيسان عودة [Bisan Owda] or معتز عزايزة [Motaz Azaiza], human faces of this crime against humanity, that rather inhabited the creation of the physical graphic scores and the final editing of "I Lost the Desert". The deep awareness of the immensely differentiated value between poor Swana bodies and those worthy of being qualified as victims, hostages to be freed or simply as human beings.

I Lost the Desert invites a state of meditative presence to sound, deep listening, and a sensitive connection between musicians and the audience, "so that the violent flow of words may cease," to quote Brossard.